What strikes me most about the Dems capitulation on warrantless eavesdropping is how naively trusting they are, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that the Bush administration would observe the parameters of the new expanded law. Look at the narrative arc for the expansion of warrantless eavesdropping (and to a lesser degree, the Patriot Act).
More after the flip
The Republican Script: Getting Around the Constitution in 9 Easy Steps
- Establish the technological infrastructure for spying.
- Break existing law in secret
- Get caught
- Deny.
- Defend. Claim the existing law makes us vulnerable to attack; claim the imperative to break it.
- Brand accusers as weak on terrorism in media
- Claim the law is too restrictive to prevent said terrorism and needs to be changed.
- Promises that an expanded law would not be abused.
- Change the law so that the original abuse is no longer an abuse of law, but enshrined.
So why on Earth would anyone trust Gonzalez & Bush to stick to the parameters of international calls, when they could just as easily monitor domestic calls (since they have a willing partner in AT&T? Maybe the iPhone is just an extravagant lure to get us all using AT&T’s network. Maybe that embedded camera is watching you, too. It could, in theory, couldn’t it? But I digress).
So what will happen next? Let’s apply the script:
- Infrastructure is already in place from the first round of FISA violations, indeed, since Total Information Awareness.
- NSA breaks FISA, indeed, probably will have been breaking it for some time, by eavesdropping on domestic calls and intercepting domestic email.
- Someone leaks. They’re caught.
- Gonzalez denies.
- Then defends.
- Then attacks. Dems are weak on terrorism. Possibly some toothless homegrown "terrorist cell," like those comical seven Haitians in Florida, will be apprehended.
- Thus illustrating for a wary public: even the expanded FISA law is too obstructive; NSA needs to be able to conduct domestic spying. The law must be changed.
- Reassurances that new expanded powers would not be abused. Reiteration of the old canard: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
- It's an election year. Right wing media does its hackwork. Dems eager to appear tough on terrorism capitulate. Now every call and email can be monitored without a warrant.
Does anyone doubt that this is the direction the Decider wants to go? Indeed, it's probably already happening; it just hasn't yet been legitimized by the above script. Why would anyone trust the NSA to observe the limits of the new law? They didn't obey the limits of the old one, even though the old FISA law was sufficient to the task, despite Justice's claims that it prevented them from acting quickly enough on credible intelligence.
You'd think the Democrats would have caught a clue by now: These guys have no intention of obeying any laws, even ones they write themselves. For them, power is its own justification; power by its nature always seeks to grow beyond its limitations. That's what "power" is.